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AI is making us work more

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Re: AI is making us work more

#261

Post by DrewADesign »

anarticle wrote: post #254
DrewADesign wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing. However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/d…

Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value. The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs? Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and…

I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are on top because they either started on top or were extremely lucky. Hucksters that find themselves one step in front of the curve, trying to claw themselves a double portion of scraps will always do better than their immediate peers in the short term, and almost universally think they’ve figured out some grand secret to gaming the system. But gaining depth and credibility is what makes people actually successful in the white collar world. We’ll never be on the same battlefield for many reasons. Good luck on yours.

Re: AI is making us work more

#262

Post by anarticle »

DrewADesign wrote: post #261
anarticle wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value. The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs? Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and…

I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are…

No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.

All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.

I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi

I deliver. It is as simple as that.

If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.

Re: AI is making us work more

#263

Post by chrisulloa »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #187
BirAdam wrote: post #146

If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday. Instead, we all just work more. Since the Information Revolution, some people get off work, go home, and continue to work. It never stops. The companies of the world will never tolerate giving people more time off. Why do that when people could just get…

> If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday I guess you missed the part where people worked 7 days a week and 10 hours per day, and we didn't have ~20% of the population retired. Unless we break social contracts, in 30 years ~40% of the population will be retired in large parts of The West and C…

A lot of people work hours like that in China and in America like 996 workers or service workers. You’ll find that as the middle class is wiped out more folks will retire later or not at all.

Re: AI is making us work more

#264

Post by rhetocj23 »

antonvs wrote: post #260
baconbrand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes… just one more data center… one more model… one million more gallons of water… it’s going to work any second now, I swear… we definitely can get human level output without human level intelligence… i promise…

Model output is already superhuman in many significant respects, which raises the question: what are you talking about?

Superhuman my arse.

Re: AI is making us work more

#265

Post by immibis »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #95
Coffeewine wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.

When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.

Distilling everything to pure numbers in a spreadsheet is one of the problems of this type of economy.

Re: AI is making us work more

#266

Post by antonvs »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #264
antonvs wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Model output is already superhuman in many significant respects, which raises the question: what are you talking about?

Superhuman my arse.

Any recent LLM can converse in more natural languages than you, can write code in more programming languages than you and do it much quicker than you, can find bugs quicker than you, can extract useful information from large amounts of text quicker than you, can produce a more balanced take on many issues than you. The list goes on. Your denial of this is either ignorance or a coping mechanism. Either way, I recommend learning more about the subject and getting meaningful experience with it in order to address those shortcomings.

Re: AI is making us work more

#267

Post by cranberryturkey »

coreyp_1 wrote: post #20
cranberryturkey wrote: post #2

it really is and its costing me about $100/day too

How? (Genuine question... I only pay for a handful of AI services, which is I'm not doubting you, btw... I've seen others here on HN also saying that they burn through money with AI, I guess I'm just missing something. In fact, the geek in me absolutely wants to know what's going on, because you have probably found something that I would love to know about! :)

i use claude

Re: AI is making us work more

#268

Post by DrewADesign »

anarticle wrote: post #262
DrewADesign wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are…

No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful. All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular. I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. http…

Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.

Re: AI is making us work more

#269

Post by baconbrand »

antonvs wrote: post #266
rhetocj23 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superhuman my arse.

Any recent LLM can converse in more natural languages than you, can write code in more programming languages than you and do it much quicker than you, can find bugs quicker than you, can extract useful information from large amounts of text quicker than you, can produce a more balanced take on many issues than you. The list goes on. Your denial of this is either ignorance or a coping mechanism. Either way, I recommen…

not to beat a dead horse but… they can’t do any of this. they can do about 20-90% of this and then hallucinate the rest, rendering the entire thing useless

I’m really not sure what your angle is here in ignoring that basic fact

Re: AI is making us work more

#270

Post by anarticle »

DrewADesign wrote: post #268
anarticle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful. All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular. I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. http…

Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.

You'd be surprised! I was a custom microscope parts maker during my time in academia, mostly one offs but a couple fun things that we shared with our collaborators. Surely not at your level of precision, but I did my tour of duty in academia for ~10y, and was none the richer for it. I can only imagine the toys you have, We had a great machinist who was an ex-tool and die guy in our department, was a dream to work with. This work was my first love, but the American student debt system caught up with me. So it goes.
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